Modern farm buildings now occupy the site, and the masonry is long gone, though a photograph from 1905 still shows stumps of stonework poking above the surface, the last visible remnants before they too disappeared. The castle's footprint can be traced more clearly through old maps than through anything standing, with a rectangular enclosure of roughly twenty by ten metres marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, and a wide fosse, or defensive ditch, recorded on the 1937 edition running from the south-west to the north-west of the site.

The castle at Dromdowney belonged to the Barrys, one of the great Anglo-Norman dynasties that shaped much of County Cork's medieval landscape. Charles Smith, writing in 1750, noted it plainly as 'Drumdowne, a ruined castle of the Barrys.' Its end, however, was not the slow decay of neglect. The castle passed into the hands of Sir Philip Perceval, and it was Perceval himself who demolished it in the mid-seventeenth century, a deliberate act of destruction carried out to prevent the structure from being seized and used by an enemy. The logic was a familiar one in the upheavals of that period: better to level your own walls than hand them over. What the maps record afterward, the arcs and ditches and broken enclosure lines, is the archaeology of that decision rather than of the original building.